


bang bang

by blindbatalex



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Whump, but like, it's mild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 04:05:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18886831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blindbatalex/pseuds/blindbatalex
Summary: Patrice took half a moment to admire how not even being ambushed by hit men and getting shot had stopped Brad from flirting. 72 hours he’s been assigned to protect this man and 70 of them Brad spent shamelessly, endlessly flirting with him--or rather, at him. The man was nothing if not consistent.In which Brad Marchand is the toughest assignment Agent Bergeron had because Brad not only flirts with him 24/7 but he also has the gall to take a bullet for Bergy, when Bergy is the one who was supposed to be protecting him in the first place. Also there is a mole in the agency and it's now up to Bergy to save them both.





	bang bang

**Author's Note:**

> consolidated and cross posted from tumblr - enjoy!

“Take off your shirt,” Patrice told Brad, keeping one eye on him while keeping the other on the road.

“When we still had a bed it was all ‘Jesus keep your clothes on’ but now you want me to take my clothes off?”

Patrice took half a moment to admire how not even being ambushed by hit men and getting shot had stopped Brad from flirting. 72 hours he’s been assigned to protect this man and 70 of them Brad spent shamelessly, endlessly flirting with him--or rather, at him. The man was nothing if not consistent.

He was also presently bleeding out in the passenger seat of their stolen Prius, however, and that when Patrice was assigned to protect him.

“We need to apply more pressure to the wound you idiot.”

“Okay, okay.”

Patrice checked the rearview mirror again for any sign that the hit men or the police were on their trail. Nothing he could see but that didn’t mean they were in the clear.

There was movement on Brad’s side of the car and then he sucked in an audible breath.

“Okay but seriously,” he said a moment later; his tone was light but the effort that went into keeping it that way was audible. “I’m not sure I can do that right now.”

Shit.

“Okay,” Patrice said.

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel Patrice pulled his shirt open and sent buttons he couldn’t bother to undo flying to the floor. Then he stripped out of it one arm at a time, eyes still on the road.

“Hello daddy,” Brad whistled but at least he caught the shirt when Patrice tossed it at him and held it tight against his arm.

_Daddy._

They were practically the same age. How was Patrice old enough to be Brad’s daddy?

“Oh also,” Brad said, just as Patrice was pondering whether to point that out. “You don’t have another shirt lying around do you?”

“Why?”

Patrice already regretted asking.

“I might have been shot in the leg too.”

Shit--what?

Patrice turned to him in an instant.

“You what?” he asked. Sure enough, now that he was looking for it, there was a tear in Brad’s jeans on his right thigh, the fabric around it stained darker than the rest.

“God, I wish you could see what you look like when you are surprised,” Brad chuckled but when Patrice looked up at him he was--

He was scared. He was dealing with it better than most men Patrice knew, certainly better than any civilian could be expected to. But his eyes were wide and there was a tightness to his mouth. Quietly asking Patrice to save him.

Patrice looked away. He wanted to yell at Brad for jumping in front of a gun for him and he wanted to tell him he was not going to die and he wanted to storm every Interpol office until he found the mole who must have given their location away, listen to them whimper with his gun digging into their temple and then to feel life bleed out of them.

None of it he could do.

“Okay,” he said instead, for what felt like the fiftieth time that day. “We will deal with it.”

****

Patrice pulled up one block from a seedy hotel on the outskirts of the city that he knew would take cash and not bother with IDs.

On the passenger side Brad did not look great. He was pale and clammy and his breaths were coming in too quick. He had also been quiet for the past fifteen minutes which was more concerning than any physical symptom.

“You are going to love this next part,” Patrice said as he reached out to retrieve the plastic bag containing the wet wipes from the back seat.

“Oh yeah?”

Patrice sighed, more for the theatrics than because he felt it. Threw some wet wipes at Brad for him to clean the blood with.

“This is a pretty sketchy hotel but even they will freak out if they realize that you’ve been shot. I need to support your weight so we will just act like you are drunk and we are here to--”

"Bang!" Brad finished for him, eyes already glinting with renewed energy.

Patrice laughed. Good. He wasn't that far gone.

"You think you are up for that?" he asked, working to wipe off blood that wasn't his own from his face.

It was a rhetorical question.

"Baby," Brad replied with a grin that stretched from one ear to the next, "I was born ready."

*

Patrice helped Brad out of the car and draped his leather jacket over Brad's shoulders. Brad slung his good arm around Patrice's shoulder and Patrice hooked a hand under Brad's armpit to take as much of his weight as he could.

They walked slowly towards the entrance of the hotel. Brad was leaning on him heavily. He had lost a lot of blood and Patrice needed to get a good look at him and do it now. But first they needed to get through this. Brad started to sing--'what is love?' of all songs--and Patrice had a sense it was to mask the pain but the man had one hell of a drunk impression nonetheless. Patrice remembered the photos of him dancing shirtless on top of bar tables that were in his file. He didn't lie when he said he was born for this.

A woman in her late twenties was manning the shabby front desk. She was wearing a black leather jacket, a large tattoo of a snake started in her neck and disappeared under its collar, and she looked like she was ready to murder the next person who crossed her.

Match made in heaven for Tuukka, Patrice thought to himself before something cold twisted in his chest.

They would have both been dead if Patrice was ten seconds late to notice the movement outside the window earlier. Hell, Brad was already a third of the way there. And all because someone--someone within Interpol--had given the location of the safehouse away.

Patrice trusted Tuukka. Then again up until two hours ago he trusted his agency. And yet someone had betrayed them.

"How can I help ya?" the receptionist asked, tearing Patrice from his thoughts.

"We need a room," Brad replied happily, slurring a little, "because we are going to fuck!"

"He is drunk," Patrice offered by way of apology, reaching for his wallet. "A room with a queen bed please."

The woman looked him up and down. There was little sympathy in her voice when she spoke.

"And yet that's not stopping you."

She didn't offer a rate.

_Great_ , Patrice thought, _a receptionist at a sex hotel with morals_. That was exactly what they needed right now.

But Brad jumped to the rescue before he could say anything.

"Listen." Brad waved his free hand in the air to emphasize his point. "For one I am not drunk, for two have you seen this man--I wanted to climb him like a tree since the moment we met."

He placed his hand on Patrice's light beard, stroking it from ear to chin. Patrice grinned and leaned into the touch.

But the next moment still caught him by surprise.

Something wet and slick behind his ear sent a shiver down his spine--and when he looked it was Brad licking a trail. He had surprising speed of movement for a man who had been shot.

The receptionist, convinced by their PDA, took the cash Patrice offered and handed them a room key on a chain that was falling apart.

*

In the elevator Brad leaned on him heavily enough to almost topple both of them off balance.

"Sorry 'bout the licking," Brad inhaled, in a voice that didn't sound very sorry at all. "Just always wanted to do that you know."

Patrice held him a little closer when he rested Brad head against his chest.

"I figured."

"I did good, didn't I?" Brad mumbled, closing his eyes as if the scene at the hotel lobby drained the last of his energy out of him.

Patrice needed him to hang on--just a little longer.

"Yes ange, you did good."

Brad looked up at him at that. His eyes were a little glazed, drooping. Patrice didn't know what he did to deserve the trust and the adoration in them. He had known Brad for all of three days, his agency was in cahoots with the guys who wanted to kill Brad, and he had failed at his literal job description which was to keep Brad safe.

"Ange," Brad repeated with a sheepish smile just as the elevator hit their floor. "I like that."

*******

Their room, once they made it there had a queen-sized bed in the middle, stains on its musty carpeting and chair haphazardly thrown into the corner.

Patrice helped Brad to the bed and started digging through his backpack for first aid supplies, offering a silent thank you to his past self for having the presence of mine to grab it when they ran out of the safehouse.

When he found what he needed, he wet some gauze at the sink to clean the wounds and dragged the chair to the bed. On it Brad’s head was tipped back against the wall and his eyes were closed. He was still breathing hard, his nose flaring up on each inhale.

“Hey,” Patrice said, something twisting in his chest. He prayed that he could actually pull this off because they would get found and killed within the hour if they went to the hospital. He prayed that he wasn’t too late.

Thankfully, Brad opened his eyes.

“Need to take a look at that,” Patrice said, gesturing at Brad’s injured leg.

He braced himself for the lewd remark he walked into.

_If you want me to take my pants off all you have to do is ask Bergy._

He would roll his eyes and he wouldn’t mind it in the slightest.

But the comment never came. Instead Brad nodded and gave him a weak okay, his eyes already half closed again.

Patrice grit his teeth. It was going to be okay. He was going to make sure it was.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he got to the wound. It had almost stopped bleeding. The bullet was still lodged into the tissue--no exit wound--but that was fine; it could stay there for a while. Brad’s arm too was a clean wound. There the bullet had gone clean through, missing the bone, and Patrice had patched up worse before. Way worse.

Brad’s skin was cool to the touch, all taut muscle under Patrice’s fingers.

“I’m gonna need you to hold still,” Patrice said when he was ready to stitch Brad up.

Rough without local anesthesia but there wasn’t much he could do.

Brad grunted when Patrice put in the first stitch but he held still.

He sank into the bedding once Patrice was done. His eyes were already closed again. Patrice took his pulse--too fast and too weak.

He stood by the bed and exhaled through his nose. “You stay here,” he told Brad a moment later, having made up his mind. Brad didn’t so much as acknowledge him.

***

The thing about hospitals was, they had terrible security. Every hospital Patrice had been to thought it had good security, and yet every time Patrice was able to walk in and walk back out with whatever he needed in at most half an hour. (Except for that one time when he got a little too close to the Russian mob and had to stay in for a month. For, you know, all the other times he had been so rude and left in a hurry, usually with stolen goods.)

Today he was walking out with two units of blood, IV antibiotics, some painkillers, and a sling. A transfusion outside the hospital without cross matching the blood was risky at best but Brad didn’t have any transfusions in the past according to his medical file, Patrice knew his blood type, and they didn’t have many options at the moment. He had lost too much blood.

Brad stirred but did not wake up when Patrice inserted the IV catheter into his arm. Patrice hooked him up to the antibiotics and the blood bag. Took his pulse again, checked the bandages on the wounds.

When there was nothing else for him to do he walked over and stood by their window.

It looked at a brick wall that was stained with soot and dirt. Patrice craned his head to see if he could catch a slice of the sky but no luck. He had made up his mind on his way back from the hospital. In the morning he would drive them to Bratislava. Zee led the Interpol branch in Slovakia and Zee was the only person left whom Patrice trusted with his life.

It would probably take them a day and a half to get there--while a 17 hour drive was nothing to Patrice this time they would need to stop over somewhere for the night. Brad was still going to be weak in the morning. Well. If there was a morning.

Patrice turned back from the window. Brad was still lying unconscious in the bed, the way Patrice left him.

He walked back and sat by the bed, in the chair he didn’t bother to move back. He took Brad’s limp hand in his own.

It made no sense to him, the first time he read Brad’s file. Who walks into a poker game among the heads of top transatlantic gun smugglers by accident and then decides to stay, because in his words, poker was poker and he was too lazy to get out and go to the game he was supposed to be at?

They had an agent who had been trying to infiltrate one of the orgs for a year. He had gotten caught and killed that night and yet here was this man, a civilian, who quipped with the security guard about how Toronto always acted so pure but played dirty and they’d just assumed he was part of the Boston crowd.

“We are going to Bratislava in the morning,” Patrice said softly. He wiped the perspiration away from Brad’s forehead with the extra t-shirt they had lying around.

He had wondered even whether Brad was in on it. If they were getting played by the promise of a testimony at a trial that was too good to be true.

That was before Brad shoved him aside and took a bullet--two bullets--for him. That was not his job. Patrice had always been the one who was expandable.

“I’m going to yell at you so much when you get better just so you know. And then I’m going to get Zee to yell at you. Have you seen Zee when he is angry? The man is terrifying.”

He brought his free hand on top of Brad’s so that he was holding Brad’s hand between both of his own. He did his best to rub some warmth back into it. Brad’s brow was knit and his mouth was pursed as if he was stuck in a nightmare he couldn’t escape but he showed no signs of consciousness otherwise.

“God,” Patrice chuckled, didn’t quite believe what he was about to say out loud. “You know, you are exactly the type of man I would pick up at a bar.” If he heard it Brad would never let him live it down. He wouldn’t stop in fact until he got Patrice to fuck him and multiple times. Which would be grossly unprofessional to say the least.

“You have that bad boy act going, and you are cocky, but you would whimper in bed. I would make you beg, but I would be so good.”

Patrice chuckled again. He would give so much to have Brad not shut up about what he just said until it made all of Patrice’s hair turn gray. This man he’d known for 72 hours.

“Knew it.”

He nearly startled out of his skin at the sound. Brad’s eyes were still closed but one corner of his mouth was curled into a delighted, incurable smile.

Patrice held his hand tighter and this time Brad’s fingers curled around his own.

“I am never going to live this down, will I?” Patrice laughed, not even bothering to sound cross.

He wasn’t surprised when the answer he got was a hoarse but very determined no.

 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading friends! if you liked the story please leave me a comment; those are the only things that nourish my soul and have me coming back to write more. I am also on tumblr at @blindbatalex and very much so welcome prompts and general yelling in my direction.
> 
> also, i know very little about actual medicine or the interpol so my bad for any inaccuracies.
> 
> EDIT: so the inspiration for this verse was hitman's bodyguard and a MASSIVE heartfelt thank you to @kureally for what she has done with the movie poster!!!


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